ADVENTURE In History

It’s long, sometimes repetitive, and utterly fascinating to someone (like me) who spent hours and hours playing ADVENTURE on campus terminals in the seventies. Dennis G. Jerz analyzes the legends, the effects, the actual physical location, and the source code of Willie Crowder’s and Don Woods’s invention of the genre of interactive fiction. I couldn’t stop reading it.

My favorite moment in the article comes on p. 172, when Jerz reveals that Don Woods contacted Willie Crowther “by sending an e-mail to ‘crowther’ at every domain name in existence at the time.” Yes, “at every domain name in existence.” Those were the days.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *